Spitzer backs protection for journalists

Journalists, and those who rely on them for news and analysis, apparently should feel good about how things will be under Governor Spitzer.

The clue comes in the case of the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who uncovered the BALCO sports doping scandal and now are being threatened with jail time for refusing to reveal their sources.

As reported on HuffingtonPost.com:

“Twenty-four states plus Puerto Rico signed one ‘friend of the court’ brief, filed by New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, arguing in support of state protection for reporters — and from incursions by the federal government.

“A second brief was filed on behalf of 36 news organizations including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC and NPR and numerous related groups in publishing and journalism, and a third was filed by six First Amendment scholars.”

Go here for more stories on the topic. (P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, the Times Union and the San Francisco Chronicle both are owned by the Hearst Corp.)

December 8, 2006 — THE most powerful media institution in all of human history is the Associated Press. Its news feed is ubiquitous – used, directly or indirectly, by every U.S. newspaper and TV news program and a vast number of foreign ones, too. AP maintains the largest world-wide coverage, and its reader base is nearly immeasurable. Unfortunately, and repeatedly of late, this behemoth has not only been getting it wrong – but increasingly refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Instead, acting more like a politician or the mega-corporation that it is, the AP crew spins, obfuscates and attacks. Now they’re at it again in Iraq.

I have got direct experience of this – from challenging the AP’s seriously flawed 1999 “scoop” about the masssacre near the South Korean village of No Gun Ri during the opening days of the Korean War.

Bad things did happen at No Gun Ri, of this there can be no doubt. My own research and other historians’, as well as the joint U.S.-Korean government investigation, confirms that a tragedy occurred – there were civilians who were killed there, by our side, and that was wrong.

But the AP’s sensationalistic story painted it as a deliberate massacre, done with machine guns at extremely close range.

The most sensational account started in the 57th paragraph of the 3,448-word story, sourced to one Edward Daily. As AP told it, Daily was the only soldier at No Gun Ri who directly received orders from his officers to turn his water-cooled .30 caliber machinegun on the civilians and shoot them down in cold blood at point-blank range.

Daily’s account was chilling. It was also – as AP should have known – a fantasy.

The AP story took at face value Daily’s claims that he was a combat infantryman who won a battlefield commission just a few days after the events at No Gun Ri, and had been awarded the Distinguished Cross and three Purple-Hearts.

In reality, he was an enlisted mechanic in an entirely different unit, nowhere near No Gun Ri. He had fabricated his biography and credentials as well as his entire account of the events at No Gun Ri.

When I later confronted AP editors with the facts and records that showed their source Daily to be a fraud, they blew me off. What would a historian know about this topic after all, or a soldier?

The AP didn’t issue a retraction, or even attempt to reinvestigate; and it certainly didn’t withdraw the story from the Pulitzer competition. Instead, it attacked the messenger.

First the AP called my boss, an Army colonel, at work. It accused me of being a liar, of being biased (pro-military and anti-journalism – when my criticism was of AP’s journistic failure in not checking its sources), of being an apologist . . . in short, every counter-accusation they could think of.

To his great credit, this internationally known scholar refused to bend to their pressure tactics to stop my academic research – so AP switched targets. It next pressured my publisher, trying to get the book suppressed that way. This, too, failed. (By coincidence, my book came out the same month that Daily pled guilty to federal fraud charges for falsely collecting more than $300,000 over the years for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for combat he never saw. )

These attacks are what I thought of when I saw the latest measures to which the AP has gone in defense of what looks to be at best a very sloppy story.

In Baghdad, the local AP team has been using a man who calls himself Police Captain Jamil Hussein for more than a year. AP claims he works in the Yarmouk police station on the west side of Baghdad – and he’s been a source for several stories on killings of Sunni civilians over the past two years. He was AP’s main source for a Thanksgiving-week report that four mosques had been attacked and burned and/or blown up, with six Sunni worshippers burned alive.

But the Iraqi government and the U.S. Army have long warned the AP about its use of “spokesmen” who don’t exist. Indeed this time it appears that there is no such officer in the Iraqi police force in Baghdad. More, they could find no evidence of such an attack (though they did see that one mosque had been hit with some gasoline and had some smoke and scorching damage in the entryway).

Did the AP retract or reinvestigate? Nah. Instead, in a follow-up story a few days later, it simply noted the old (2005) news about efforts to plant Coalition press releases in the Iraqi media, accused the Iraqis of censorship and claimed that it had found three more (anonymous, naturally) witnesses. In effect, AP said that, no matter what the Iraqi police headquarters said, Hussein is one of its spokesmen after all.

Bizarrely, it seems that not even Iraqi Sunni politicians believe the AP story; even the radical Association of Muslim Scholars hasn’t embraced the account. But we here are supposed to anyway. After all, AP doesn’t make mistakes.

Robert Bateman is an author, historian and Army infantry officer. He was stationed in Iraq from January 2005 until February 2006. His most recent book is “No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident.”